DOMESDAY SURVEY appearance in any county. In reaction from Thierry, who insisted on the expropriation of all Englishmen as such, Mr. Freeman was disposed to make the most of all the cases in which men of the conquered race can be proved to have held land or wealth under the Norman kings. 1 In par- ticular he made the existence of this class of king's thegns a test by which to determine the circumstances under which the several counties of England came under William's power. Where no Englishmen appear as holding of the crown, as in Kent and Sussex, he maintained that a severe resistance to the Conqueror on the part of the shire had caused its thegns to lose their lands ; where, as in Derbyshire and in Nottinghamshire they are to be found, he argued that a timely submission had been the cause of the king's favour. But the status of the class does not support so far reaching a theory. The king's thegns did not rank with the tenants in chief by military service ; they are placed after the sergeants in those counties where both occur, and they quickly died out as a distinct class south of the Humber under the sons of the Conqueror. There was no place for them in the feudal system which was growing up under the Norman kings. The conditions of their tenure, so far as these can be gathered from authorities of later date than Domesday, were proper to an older system of society than the feudalism of the end of the eleventh century they could not be fitted into the new scheme and they dis- appeared. Moreover in Derbyshire at least their holdings were insig- nificant in extent. Out of a total of 700 carucates cast upon the whole shire the king's thegns only held twenty-three, and their current value is only returned as 14 4*. 8*/. out of a total valet for the county of 425. With regard to the individual members of the class it does not seem that we can recover any personal detail. There seems to be nothing to mark them off from the undistinguished crowd of landholders who did not survive the Conquest. Very rarely does the Domesday thegn appear to be identical with the man who held his land in King Edward's time. At Ilkeston, part of which had been held by one Osmund, styled 'benz,' we are told that 'he himself holds it of the king,' and the same formula appears at ' Cellesdene,' the former owner of which was an Osmund. So careless are the Domesday scribes about the names of Englishmen that it is quite possible that these two men may be identical. An Earnwig (Ernui) held at Clowne the land which he had held in King Edward's time, and it is probable that the 'Toli' who held the greater part of Sandiacre in 1086 was the same as the 'Toli' who with two other thegns, one of whom bore the historic name of Cnut, had held the same manor before the Conquest. Of course, in the twenty years which had passed since that event many changes might take place , in the ordinary course of succession ; in the case of Risley it is distinctly stated that the son of the former owner held of the king, and in several instances the existing tenant is not mentioned by name. Before passing from the tenants in chief of Derbyshire to the rural society found on their estates, it will be well to consider the account which 1 Norman Conquest, iv. passim. See V. C. H. Northanti, i. 324. 307
